Counterparts”

Summary

In a busy law firm, one of the partners, Mr. Alleyne, angrily orders the secretary to send Farrington to
his office. Farrington is a copy clerk in the firm, responsible for making copies of legal documents by
hand, and he has failed to produce an important document on time. Mr. Alleyne taunts Farrington
and says harshly that if he does not copy the material by closing time his incompetence will be
reported to the other partner. This meeting angers Farrington, who mentally makes evening plans to
drink with his friends as a respite. Farrington returns to his desk but is unable to focus on work. He
skirts past the chief clerk to sneak out to the local pub where he quickly drinks a beer.

Two clients are speaking with the chief clerk when Farrington returns to the office, making his
absence apparent. The clerk asks him to take a file to Mr. Alleyne, who is also with a client.
Farrington realizes that the needed file is incomplete because he has failed to copy two letters as
requested. Hoping that Mr. Alleyne will not notice, Farrington delivers the incomplete file and returns
to his desk to work on his project. Again unable to concentrate, Farrington dreams of hot drinks and
crowded pubs, only to realize, with increasing rage, that completing the task is impossible and that
he has no hope of getting an advance on his paycheck to fund his thirst. Meanwhile, Mr. Alleyne,
having noticed the missing letters, has come to Farrington’s desk with his client, the jovial Miss
Delacour, and started another abusive critique of Farrington’s work. Farrington claims ignorance and
wittily insults Mr. Alleyne to the amusement of Miss Delacour and his fellow clerks.

Forced to apologize to Mr. Alleyne, Farrington leaves work without completing his project and
dreading the sure backlash at the office. More determined than ever to go to the pub, Farrington
pawns his pocket watch for drinking money. At his first stop he meets his friends Nosey Flynn,
O’Halloran, and Paddy Leonard, and tells them of his shining moment insulting his boss. Another
clerk from the office arrives and joins them, repeating the story. Soon the men leave the pub, and
O’Halloran, Leonard, and Farrington move on to another place. There Leonard introduces the men to
an acrobat named Weathers, who happily accepts the drinks the other men buy for him. Farrington
becomes irritated at the amount of money he spends, but the men keep drinking and move to yet
another pub. Weathers meets the men there and Farrington begrudgingly buys him another drink out
of courtesy. Farrington’s frustrations build as he flirts with an elegant woman sitting nearby who
ultimately ignores his advances. Leonard and O’Halloran then convince Farrington to arm wrestle
with Weathers, who has been boasting about his strength to the men. After two attempts, Farrington
loses.

Filled with rage and humiliation, Farrington travels home to Shelbourne Road, a lower-middle-class
area southeast of the city center. Entering his dark house, he calls to his wife Ada but is met by one
of his five children, his son Tom. When Tom informs him that Ada is at church, Farrington orders
Tom to light up the house and prepare dinner for him. He then realizes that the house fire has been
left to burn out, which means his dinner will be long in coming. With his anger at boiling point,
Farrington begins to beat Tom, who plaintively promises to say a Hail Mary for Farrington if he stops.

Analysis

While many characters in Dubliners desire something, face obstacles that frustrate them, and
ultimately forfeit their desires in paralysis, Farrington sees everything in the world as an obstacle to
his comfort and never relents in his vitriol. The tedium of work irritates Farrington first, but so does
everything he encounters in the story. The root of Farrington’s violent and explosive behavior is the
circular experience of routine and repetition that defines his life. Farrington’s job is based on
duplication—he copies documents for a demanding boss. His job, in other words, is to produce
replications of other things, and the monotony of this job enrages him. Farrington envisions release
from such deadening activity in the warmth and drink of public houses, but his experiences there only
beget further routine. He repeats the story of the confrontation with Mr. Alleyne to his friends, who
then also repeat it. Following the “round” tradition in which each person in a group takes turns buying
drinks for all companions present, he continually spends money and consumes more alcohol. The
presence of Weathers, who takes advantage of this system, makes Farrington realize how such
tradition and repetition literally rob him. His anger mounts throughout the story.

Farrington hurtles forward in the story without pausing to think about his actions or why he feels such
discontent. As a result, his circular activities become more and more brutal. When he loses two arm
wrestling matches to Weathers, a “mere boy,” he goes home only to beat his own boy. What begins
as mundane copying, the story hints, spins out of control into a cycle of brutal abuse. While other
characters in the collection acknowledge their routine lives, struggle, then accept their fate passively,
Farrington is unaware and unrelenting. The title, “Counterparts,” refers to a copy or duplicate of a
legal paper, the stuff of Farrington’s career, but also to things that are similar or equal to each other.
Farrington lives a life of counterparts, to dangerous ends. His pawning of his watch may symbolically
release him from the shackles of schedules and time demands, but the frustrations of work only take
on new and more extreme forms at the pub and at home. For Farrington, life repeats itself: work is
like the pub is like home. As “Counterparts” illustrates, this bleeding between different areas of life
inevitably exists. When maddening routine and repetition form the backbone of experience, passivity
may result, but so too might volatile frustration.

The abuse that other stories in Dubliners allude to becomes explicit in “Counterparts,” and the
consistent emotional theme of anger underpins every event in the story. Joyce uses adjectives like
heavy, dark, and dirty to describe Farrington—he is quite literally worn out by frustration and anger.
Not even the desperate servitude and piety of his son touch him, signaling that spirituality fails to
save and protect. Farrington is unable to realize that his own actions are far worse than the mocking
cruelty of his boss. Joyce refers to Farrington both by his name and as “the man” throughout the
story. In one sentence he is the familiar character of Farrington that the reader follows throughout the
story, yet in another he is “the man” on the street, on the train, in an office. Farrington, in a sense,
acts as an exchangeable or general type, both a specific man and everyman. Joyce’s fluid way of
addressing him thus serves to weave Farrington into the Dublin streetscape and suggest that his
brutality is nothing unusual.

A Little Cloud”

He remembered the books of poetry upon his shelves at home. He had bought them in his bachelor
days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room of the hall, he had been tempted to take one
down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness always held him back; and
so the books had remained on their shelves.

(See Important Quotations Explained)

Summary

Little Chandler eagerly awaits a reunion with his old friend Ignatius Gallaher, who moved to London
eight years ago. A married man and father who earned his nickname from his small and delicate
deportment, Little Chandler whittles away the afternoon hours at his clerical job, constantly thinking
about his approaching evening drink. Little Chandler wonders in amazement at Gallaher’s impressive
career writing for English newspapers, though he never doubted that Gallaher would do well for
himself. As Little Chandler leaves work and walks to the bar where the men agreed to meet, he
contemplates Gallaher’s homecoming and success, then thinks of his own stunted writing aspirations
and the possibilities of life abroad that remain out of his reach. Little Chandler used to love poetry,
but he gave it up when he got married. As he walks he considers the far-fetched possibility of writing
his own book of poems.

In the bar, Little Chandler and Gallaher talk about foreign cities, marriage, and the future. Little
Chandler is surprised to see Gallaher’s unhealthy pallor and thinning hair, which Gallaher blames on
the stress of press life. Throughout the conversation, during which the men consume three glasses
of whiskey and smoke two cigars, Little Chandler simultaneously recoils from and admires Gallaher’s
gruff manners and tales of foreign cities. He is displeased with Gallaher’s presumptuous way of
addressing others and wonders about the immorality of a place like Paris with its infamous dance
halls. At the same time, he envies Gallaher’s worldliness and experience. Little Chandler has settled
down with a wife and has a son. When he himself becomes the subject of conversation, he is uneasy
and blushes. He manages to invite Gallaher to visit his home and meet his family that evening, but
Gallaher explains that he has another appointment and must leave the bar soon. The men have their
final drink together, and the conversation returns to and ends with Gallaher and his bachelorhood.
When Little Chandler insists that Gallaher will one day marry, the journalist scoffs at the prospect,
claiming that if he does so he will marry rich, but as it stands he is content to please himself with
many women rather than become bored with one.

Later that night in his house, Little Chandler waits for his wife to come home from the local store—
Chandler had forgotten to bring home coffee in his flurry of excitement about Gallaher. While he
holds his baby son in his arms, as directed by his wife, he gazes at a picture of her and recounts his
conversation with Gallaher. Unlike Gallaher’s exotic, passionate mistresses, his wife appears cold
and unfeeling, though pretty. Chandler begins to question his marriage and its trappings: a “little”
house, a crying child. Reading a passage of Byron stirs his longings to write, but soon his wife
returns home to snatch the screaming child from his arms and scold her husband. Little Chandler
feels remorse for his rebellious thoughts.

Analysis

“A Little Cloud” maps the frustrated aspirations Little Chandler has to change his life and pursue his
dream of writing poetry. The story contrasts Little Chandler’s dissatisfaction and temerity with
Gallaher’s bold writing career abroad. Little Chandler believes that to succeed in life, one must leave
Dublin like Gallaher did. However, Gallaher’s success is not altogether confirmed in this story, unless
one measures his success by his straightforward, unrestrained take on life. Little Chandler compares
himself to Gallaher, and in doing so blames his shortcomings on the restraints around him, such as
Dublin, his wife, and his child. He hides from the truth that his aspirations to write are fanciful and
shallow. Not once in the story does Little Chandler write, but he spends plenty of time imagining fame
and indulging in poetic sentiments. He has a collection of poetry books but cannot muster the
courage to read them aloud to his wife, instead remaining introverted and repeating lines to himself.
He constantly thinks about his possible career as a poet of the Celtic school and envisions himself
lauded by English critics, often to the extent that he mythologizes himself. Little Chandler uses his
country to dream of success, but at the same time blames it for limiting that success.

While dreaming of a poetic career may provide escape for Little Chandler, the demands of work and
home that serve as obstacles to his dreams ultimately overwhelm him. Like other characters in
Dubliners, Little Chandler experiences an epiphany that makes him realize he will never change his
life. Looking at a picture of his wife after returning home from the pub, Little Chandler sees the
mundane life he leads and briefly questions it. The screams of his child that pierce his concentration
as he tries to read poetry bring him to a tragic revelation. He knows he is “prisoner” in the house.
Little Chandler’s fleeting resistance is like a little cloud that passes in the sky. By the end of the story
he feels ashamed of his disloyal behavior, completing the circle of emotions, from doubt to assurance
to doubt, that he probably will repeat for the rest of his life. The story finishes where it began: with
Little Chandler sighing about his unrealized aspirations, but submitting to the melancholy thought that
“it was useless to struggle against fortune.” Circular routine plagues Chandler as it does for most of
the characters in Dubliners.

Little Chandler’s inability to act on his desires and his dependence on Gallaher to provide
experiences he can participate in vicariously make him similar to Lenehan in “Two Gallants.” Just as
Lenehan stands in Corley’s shadow, Little Chandler admires and envies Gallaher. Even when he
realizes that Gallaher refuses his invitation to see his home and family out of disinterest, he keeps
such sentiments to himself. In Gallaher, an old friend who has done well for himself, Little Chandler
sees the hope of escape and success. This friendship sustains Little Chandler’s fantasies, allowing
him to dream that Gallaher might submit one of his poems to a London paper, and allowing him to
feel superior because he has foreign connections. At the same time, as the meeting at the pub
progresses, Little Chandler feels cheated by the world since Gallaher can succeed and he cannot,
and so once again the friend provides a barometer to measure and judge himself against. Left on his
own with his books, Little Chandler must face his own shortcomings.